Creative code for who?
Dissecting creative technology with Gisela Zuniga
Over the past few years, creative technology has become a buzzword as robots make art and new companies sprout up to make high resolution displays for showcasing digital art. While the art world has long been critiqued as a place of scarcity, privilege and capitalism, creative technology is promised as a new and redistributive field. We dive into the realities and hopes of the industry with Gisela.
Xiaowei Wang
Could you introduce yourself?
Gisela Zuniga
I'm Gisela Zuniga, a communications and operations person at a technology nonprofit. I am a queer femme person of multiracial experience. For my Logic School project, I was thinking a lot about my professional background working in media and film and how that intersects with a lot of the technology landscape. Particularly in the field of creative technology and creative coding which manifests in things like p5.js, virtual reality and augmented reality, museum installations and so on. For example, an interactive installation falls under creative technology — if you go to a science museum and you see a projection of an environment on the wall and the image changes based on where you touch or, if you put on a headset and you find that you're in a totally different world.
If you’re outside of the industry, you might not realize that technology and art have pretty similar production pipelines — you have an idea you want to execute, you bring together a group of people, some people build it, and other people oversee and coordinate the logistics of building it, you run through it a couple of different times and iterate, and then you release it to whoever your audience is. The thing is, oftentimes, the people who are actually building the thing don't have the kinds of protections needed to sustainably build careers in these fields.
I was thinking about, how is the relationship between the contemporary labor movement and technology interconnected with the contemporary labor movement in art, and how does that show up in creative technology? So I started out with the idea of a zine to use as a framework to talk about these things. I conducted research: Where do these creative technology spaces, institutions, and programs get their money? Who invests in them and who do they invest in? I also conducted a variety of interviews with different people who do everything from user experience design to museum installation, interactive technologies, to UX designers, to filmmakers, who use augmented reality and virtual reality etc. A lot of similar things came up around the bi-coastal, elite, creative technology sectors, largely in the US, where these resources are concentrated. I learned that there is a culture of working yourself to the bone to prove yourself and rise ranks very quickly, and that hustle and grind culture is glorified.
An interesting thing that manifests stress is around certain work benefits, such as taking time off — oftentimes people won't because they have been hired as contractors. A lot of tech companies will use unlimited time off as a way to bring in employees but that, research has shown, actually creates a lot more stress for people because they might feel guilty about taking off too much time, or for not knowing how much time is too much time, etc.
There's also the element of who funds these things. So there's a lot of the nonprofit industrial complex coming into play with these two particular things and a lot of investment around what the future looks like. When it comes to conferences and festivals, there’s a set of people who are compensated fairly and then, the people who actually put on these events, who do the manual labor, the docents and the attendees, are subjected to a very similar gig economy.
A big part of the zine was to ask people, ‘What was your experience as a contractor or as an employee? Do you feel like you had a way to speak out about particular issues at work or to interrogate where funding has come from?’
Xiaowei
I feel like I see a lot of calls and grants from tech companies that give away money to artists. Google will say it's giving away money for artists to use Magenta. Some people say that it’s a great opportunity. Is it?
Gisela
The reason why it's a problematic statement or something that should be interrogated, both by people who consume this artwork and the people who make it, is that, just because technology is pretty doesn't mean that it's actually going to help — it might actually harm. Google and Facebook, whenever they create a new technology, it often gets integrated in a lot of their tools and software that they already offer. We’ll give artists a lot of money to use our technologies to create different experiences or worlds or stories. Why use a paint brush when you can use Google AI and Google will pay for it? That's a very difficult thing to turn down.
At the same time, why is Google paying so much money for a pretty version of their software when a lot of that money could have gone to paying for health insurance for people, or supporting artists more broadly?
Xiaowei
As we’ve gotten to know each other in Logic School, one thing I’ve gotten to learn about you is your organizing on the ground in Texas and your storytelling through media, like the film you were associate producer on and that landed at Tribeca Film Fest 2021. Could you talk about your own trajectory from Texas to this coastal life?
Gisela
Growing up not on the coast, if I wanted to leave my home and do something that influenced “the nation” or “the world” on a different scale, that would be something that would have to happen in a place where a lot of global or nationally scaled workplaces are located. In terms of cultural production, it has historically been the coasts. I think that's still very much the case. Financial aid made it possible for me to come to New York for school, and it was really interesting coming here. A lot of people come here from all over the world to make things, to make media, but at the same time it feels like a bubble because everything just gets recycled back into this ecosystem. Not a lot is really diverted to other places. And then, it's only really if someone manually brings the resources over to other places — whether it's by hiring people from out of state, or getting funding to do something elsewhere. Even then, the media is mostly distributed in these two particular centers. It's interesting seeing how a lot of these ecosystems coexist in terms of cementing these cultural hubs, and are often financially self-serving. They'll just keep pouring money back into themselves in order to maintain their status as being the place one must be. It’s not an accessible way of making anything.
The ways that technology and art sometimes blend together in these places feels like a multi-level marketing scheme — it sells its employees and its workers an image they then sell to the next generation of workers and then maintain these hubs. At the same time, there’s a big contemporary labor movement in these industries. Part of the reason why I talk about technology in relationship with another industry is because I don't think technology is in its own silo—it really exists in relationship with pretty much every other industry.
Xiaowei
Where do you think your project might go?
Gisela
I think the conversation around unions, labor and tech have been going on for a long time but, particularly over the past couple of years, we've really seen a big conversation around it that feels like it's gaining traction.
Lately that's something that I've been following a lot. I think something else that I've been following a lot are unions at digital media companies, as well as in film and documentary, which is where a lot of my professional background comes from. What's really interesting is thinking about the overlaps between organizing, between writers and engineers. There's one Instagram account called @ia_stories, for this union called the IATSE [Ed: International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees]. That Instagram account has inspired a lot of production workers to start talking about labor conditions. It seems like someone should start an Instagram account regarding people who work in VR and creative coding and interactive installations.
The purpose of the zine was to serve as a resource for people so that they feel less alone, and perhaps get some ideas for, and tools to, navigate different kinds of workplaces or how to really think about whether or not you're being exploited at work. A lot of these Instagram accounts are sharing anonymous stories from people, which I think is a really interesting thing because you get a lot of specific examples of how a lot of these labor exploitation practices come into fruition. Then, using those as ways to pinpoint what to look out for but also as a bargaining tool to use as evidence whenever you want to negotiate something with someone who's hiring you, or with a boss or a company that you work for.
A lot of the conversation is around imagining the future without really addressing what's happening in the present. So many different tools and technologies are created, but what kind of labor does it take to make them and who gets left out of the equation of being properly compensated or credited for their work in creating these things? Think about: What is my role in creating this thing and sharing it with the world? Whatever the product might be, who's building it? And if you're the one who's building it, do you feel like you have a real sense of ownership over it? Do you feel like the people you're making it for have a sense of ownership? If you're leading a team, think about, am I giving enough opportunities to people to really grow and learn new skills, and potentially be in a place where they could grow into leaders themselves? Am I paying them a living wage? Whatever you think you're paying your workers, pay them more. Actually check in with them. What would make them feel empowered at work? Then listen to them. Because it doesn't lead anyone anywhere if you just assume.
Gisela Zuniga (she/her/hers) is a multimedia artist and writer who found herself working in tech during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Find Gisela at https://www.instagram.com/giselanutella/